Monday, June 05, 2017

French learners are well acquainted with the acronym "Dr. & Mrs. Vandertramp" which is used to help remember which of the verbs in the passee compose conjugation format use "etre" (to be) instead of "avoir" (to have).

Voila here is the document that is usually handed out to students of French. Meet the Vandertramps!

So we were introduced to the French future tense in class last week and would't you know it, there are irregular versions of future tense verbs. I wondered in class why there wasn't a device similar to the Vandertramp one to help French learners.

My teacher suggested that maybe I should create one if I really wanted one.

So I did. And now I know why nobody has ever created one before. Because unlike with passee compose, where only the endings of the verbs change, in le tense futur a couple of the verbs completely change, including the first letter, which changes the acronym.

And I didn't even realize it until I put it all down in Photoshop. Oh well, it was a learning experience.

Merde!

I feel like Dr. Facemapps would run advertisements in the NY Subway system.

Volitional language learners are something of an eccentric crew so we get lots of comedy mileage out of the name "Vandertramp" inserting the name into many French learning scenario situations.

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.